It’s Okay to Not Be Okay: Bird Construction’s Jason Ross on Men’s Mental Health in the Trades
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Construction has spent decades getting better at protecting people from physical hazards. The mental ones are still mostly handled the old way: you get hurt, you wipe yourself off, and you get back out there.
In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Jason Ross, a health and safety manager at Bird Construction with about 25 years in the industry, to talk about why that approach stops working and what he has seen happen when a tradesperson finally says out loud that he is struggling.
About six years ago, Jason was coming off a three-week rotation on a project in northern Manitoba. It was mid-December, he was behind the wheel in a snowstorm between Snow Lake and Flin Flon, and about 20 minutes into the drive his heart started pounding, his vision narrowed and he could not speak. He was sure he was having a heart attack. He handed the wheel to his director and spent the rest of the trip in the back seat, convinced he would not make it home for Christmas. When he described it to a friend in the wellness field, the answer was simple: “Jay, you had a panic attack.” Professional help followed, along with a diagnosis of complex PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder, tied to an event from his twenties that he had kept to himself for decades.
Today he chairs Bird’s mental health employee resource group and spends a good part of his time on job sites talking with crews about mental health.
This conversation breaks down:
- The drive in northern Manitoba that changed how he understood his own health
- Why the suck-it-up culture he grew up with in sports and blue-collar work kept him quiet for so long
- The tools he still relies on, from counselling to breath work and cold therapy, and why some days are still hard
- How he reads a room, whether it is a boardroom or a toolbox talk with 150 tradespeople
- Why looking and sounding like the crew builds trust that a polished presenter can struggle to earn
- How Bird’s employee resource group got more than 150 people trained in mental health first aid, starting with frontline foremen
- What he thinks the industry needs next, including better benefits for counselling and faster access to support
Jason is open that the work is ongoing. “Some days are good, some days are bad,” he says. The day before our recording, he nearly had a panic attack in his barber’s chair and used breathing and centring techniques to get through it. His advice for anyone on a long shift is practical: step away from the laptop or the phone a few times a day, get outside, and take a minute to reset.
He is just as honest about speaking up. Getting in front of a crew is “nerve wracking every time,” but he measures success by the few people who come up to him afterwards. “If I can connect with one, two, three people in that room, then I know that that conversation is going to continue.” He credits his appearance with a lot of it. Jeans, a polo, tattoos and a big beard tell a room of ironworkers and electricians that he is one of them, and as he puts it, “It builds trust.”
You will also hear how a talk by former NHL goaltender Corey Hirsch convinced Jason his own story might help, the two numbers he puts on screen to get a crew talking, and the 988 token with a QR code that Bird’s resource group sends to sites and offices so help is always within reach.
If you lead crews, manage a safety program, or have ever kept quiet about something because the site did not feel like the place to bring it up, this episode is worth your time.
You can find Jason Ross on LinkedIn.
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